AMD Ryzen 9 8945HS vs Intel Core i9-14900HX

AMD Ryzen 9 8945HS

The Ryzen 9 8945HS is a rebadged Ryzen 9 7940HS with higher clock speeds on the Ryzen AI NPU. To be more specific, this is a powerful Hawk Point family laptop chip that has eight Zen 4 cores running at 4.0 GHz to 5.2 GHz. This APU was brought to life in H2 2023 and all of its cores are SMT-enabled for a total of 16 processing threads.

The Radeon 780M serves as the integrated graphics adapter.

Architecture & Features

Hawk Point family chips are powered by the Zen 4 architecture, much like Phoenix and Dragon Range family chips are. That's not to say there is no difference between the three. With Hawk Point, AMD is betting big on generative AI; these chips are promised to deliver an up to 40% increase in generative AI performance over 7040 series APUs making apps like DaVinci Resolve and Adobe Photoshop even more powerful.

Unlike Zen 3, Zen 4 features AVX512 support and, thanks to a plethora of other improvements including larger caches/registers/buffers across the board, is slated to bring a double-digit IPC improvement over the former.

Elsewhere, the 8945HS has 16 MB of L3 cache and support for super-fast RAM (up to LPDDR5x-7500 or DDR5-5600; no ECC support). The processor is compatible with USB 4 and thus with Thunderbolt; PCIe support is limited to the 4.0 spec for a throughput of 1.97 GB/s per lane. 20 lanes are available.

OS support is limited to 64-bit editions of Windows 11 and Windows 10 and of course to Linux. Note that the chip isn't overclockable and neither is it user-replaceable as it gets soldered down for good (FP7, FP7r2, FP8 socket interfaces).

Performance

The 8945HS is an R9 7940HS in disguise, so it's realistic to expect the chip to be just slightly faster than the Core i9-12900HK and also the Ryzen 7 7840HS, as far as multi-thread performance is concerned.

Your mileage may vary depending on how high the CPU power limits are and how competent the cooling solution of your system is.

Graphics

The Radeon 780M has 12 CUs (768 shaders) running at up to 2,800 MHz. This is a very fast iGPU, as of late 2023. It will let you use up to 4 monitors with resolutions as high as SUHD 4320p, and it is also capable of HW-encoding and HW-decoding the most widely used video codecs including AVC, HEVC and AV1. More importantly, it is fast enough for proper 1080p gaming as long as one is fine with low to medium detail settings.

Your mileage may vary depending on how high the CPU power limits are, how competent the cooling solution of the system is, how fast the RAM of the system is (there is no dedicated VRAM here).

Power consumption

This Ryzen 9 series chip has a long-term power limit (default TDP) of 35 W to 54 W, giving laptop makers a choice between longer battery life and higher performance. Either way, an active cooling solution is a must for a system powered by this chip.

The 8945HS is built with TSMC's 4 nm process for high, as of late 2023, energy efficiency.

Intel Core i9-14900HX

The Intel Core i9-14900HX is a high-end CPU based on the Raptor Lake architecture for large and heavy notebooks. The CPU was introduced at the beginning of 2024 and is a slightly higher clocked variant of the older Core i9-13980HX.

The total of 32 threads are divided into P-cores and E-cores, which we already know from Alder-Lake. Here, 8 performance cores (P-cores) with hyperthreading are used and 16 efficiency cores, so that a total of 32 threads can be processed simultaneously. The P-cores clock from 2.2 GHz (base clock) to 5.8 GHz (single-core turbo) and the E-cores from 1.6 GHz to 4.1 GHz.

Performance

Due to the slightly higher maximum clock rates, the single-core performance of the 14900HX in particular increases slightly compared to the 13980HX. Compared to AMD's top model, the Ryzen 9 7945HX or 7945HX3D the 14900HX comes in just behind (on average in our benchmarks). However, the performance depends on the benchmark and the cooling and is usually very comparable.

Graphics

Like the Intel Core i9-12900HX, the Intel Core i9-14900HX offers an integrated graphics unit. The Intel Iris XE architecture continues to serve as the basis. In terms of performance, however, not much has changed with the Intel UHD Graphics 770.

The 14900HX is manufactured on the improved 10nm FinFET process at Intel (Intel 7 process) and is specified with 55 watts of base power and 157 watts of turbo power.